without a blessing, without even thanks. Don Wanderley squatted on the floor beside Stella's chair and put an arm over her shoulders.
'Yeah, you hear me. Well, listen. I used to be a Marine, you know what, lawyer? Korea. Had three stripes, hear that?' A loud crash: Hardesty had fallen into a chair or knocked over a lamp. Ricky did not answer. 'Three goddamned stripes. A leatherneck. You could call me a goddamned hero, I don't mind. Well, I didn't need you to tell me to go out to that farm. Neighbor went in there around eleven-found 'em all. Scales killed 'em all. Shot 'em. And afterward laid down under his goddamned tree and blew his head apart. State cops took all the bodies away in a helicopter. Now you tell me why he did it, lawyer. And you tell me how you knew something happened out there.'
'Because I once borrowed his father's car,' Ricky said. 'I know it doesn't make sense, Walt.'
Don looked up at him from beside Stella, but she merely pushed her face deeper into her hands.
'Doesn't make-shit. Beautiful. Well, you can find a new sheriff for this town. I'm clearin' out as soon as the county plows get in. I can go anywhere-record like mine. Anywhere? Not because of out there-not because of Scales's little massacre. You and your rich-bitch friends been sittin' on something all along-
Ricky said nothing.
'You can call it Anna Mostyn, but that's just sheer plain lawyer's crap. Goddamn it, I always thought you were an asshole, Hawthorne. But I'm tellin' you now, anything shows up around here with ideas about moving me around, I'm gonna blow it in half. You and your buddies got all the fancy ideas, if you got any buddies left, you can take care of things around here. I'm stayin' in here until the roads get clear, sent the deputies home, anybody comes around here I shoot first. Questions later. Then I get out.'
'What about Sears?' Ricky asked, knowing that Hardesty would not tell him until he asked. 'Has anyone seen Sears?'
'Oh, Sears
Ricky said, 'Hardesty's lost his mind and Sears is dead.' Stella began to weep; soon he and she and Don were in a circle, arms around each other for that primitive consolation. 'I'm the only one left,' Ricky said into his wife's shoulder. 'My God, Stella. I'm the only one left.'
Late that night each of them-Ricky and Stella in their bedroom, Don in the guest-room-heard the music playing through the town, exclamatory trumpets and breathy saxophones, the arcadian music of the soul's night the liquid music of America's underside, and they heard in it an extra strain of release and abandonment. Dr. Rabbitfoot's band was celebrating.
5
After Christmas even neighbors stopped seeing each other, and the few optimists who still had plans for New Year's Eve quietly forgot them. All the public buildings stayed closed, Young Brothers and the library, the drugstores and the churches and the offices: on Wheat Row the drifts lapped up against the facades all the way to the rain gutters. Even the bars stayed closed, and fat Humphrey Stalladge stayed in his frame house out behind the tavern listening to the wind and playing pinochle with his wife, thinking that when the county plows got in he'd start making more money than the mint-nothing brought people into bars like bad times. His wife said, 'Don't talk like a gravedigger,' and that killed the conversation and the pinochle too for a while: everybody knew about Sears James and Omar Norris and, the worst of all, about what Elmer Scales had done. It seemed that if you listened to that snow hissing long enough, you wouldn't just hear it telling you that it was waiting for you, you'd hear some terrible secret -a secret to turn your life black. Some Milburn people snapped awake in the dog-hours of morning, three o'clock, four o'clock, and thought they saw one of those poor Scales kids standing at the foot of the bed, grinning at them: couldn't place which of the boys it was, but it had to be Davey or Butch or Mitchell. And took a pill to get back to sleep and forget the way little Davey or Butch or whoever-it-was looked, with his ribs shining underneath his skin and his skinny face shining too.
Eventually the town heard about Sheriff Hardesty: how he was holed up in his office with all those bodies waiting in the utility cells. Two of the Pegram boys had snowmobiles, and they coasted up the door of the sheriff's office to check him out-see if he was as nutty as the rumor said. A whiskery face jammed itself up against the window as they climbed off the snowmobiles: Hardesty lifted his pistol so the boys could see it and shouted through the glass that if they didn't pull off those damn ski masks and show their faces they wouldn't have any faces left. Most people knew someone who had a friend who'd had to go past the sheriff's office and swore that he heard Hardesty shouting in there, yelling at nothing or at himself-or at whatever it was that could move freely around Milburn in this weather, sliding in and out of their dreams, exulting in shadows whenever they'd just turned their heads: whatever it was that could account for that music some of them had heard around midnight on Christmas night- inexplicable music that should have sounded joyful but was instead wound full of the darkest emotions they knew. They pushed their heads into their pillows and told themselves it was a radio or a trick of the wind- they'd tell themselves anything rather than believe that something was out there that could make a noise so fearsome.
Peter Barnes got out of bed that night, having heard the music and imagining that this time the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn and Don's Dr. Rabbitfoot were making a special trip to get him. (But there was another cause, he knew.) He locked his door and climbed back into bed and pushed his hands down on his ears; but the wild music got louder, coming down his street, and louder still.
It stopped directly in front of his house: sliced off in the middle of a bar, as if a button on a tape recorder had been pushed. The silence was more charged with possibilities than the music had been. Finally Peter could stand the tension no longer, and softly left his bed and looked out of his window onto the street.
Down there, down where he had once seen his father marching off to work looking dumpy and Russian, stood a line of people in bright moonlight. Nothing could stop him from recognizing the figures standing on the fresh snow where the road should have been. They stood gazing up at him with shadowed eyes and open mouths, the town's dead, and he would never know if they stood there only in his mind or if Gregory Bate and his benefactor had stirred these facsimiles and made them move: or if Hardesty's jail and a half-dozen graves had opened to let their inhabitants walk. He saw Jim Hardie staring up at his window, and the insurance salesman Freddy Robinson, and old Dr. Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt, and Harlan Bautz-he had died while shoveling snow. Omar Norris and Sears James were beside the dentist. Peter's heart moved to see Sears- he'd known that was why the music had sounded again. A girl stepped out from behind Sears, and Peter blinked to see Penny Draeger, her once-exciting face as blank and dead as all the others. A small group of children stood mutely beside a tall scarecrow with a shotgun, and Peter nodded, mouthing the word 'Scales' to himself: he had not known. Then the crowd divided to let his mother come forward.
She was not the lifelike ghost he had seen in the Bay Tree Market's parking lot: like the others, his mother was washed of life, too empty even for despair. She seemed animated only by need-need at a level beneath all feeling. Foreshortened by his angle of vision, Christina came forward over the snow to the boundary of their property; she extended her arms up to him and her mouth moved. He knew that no human words could have issued from that mouth, from that driven body- it must have been only a moan or a cry. She, they, all were asking him to come out: or were they pleading for surcease, for sleep? Peter began to cry. They were eerie, not frightening. Standing out there below his window, so pitiably drained, they were as if merely dreamed. The Bates and their benefactor had sent them, but it was him they needed. The tears cold on his cheeks, Peter turned away from the window; so many, so many, so many.
Face up, he lay back on his bed; stared with open eyes at the ceiling. He knew they would go: or would he look out in the morning to see them all still there, frozen into place like snowmen? But the music blared into life again, suddenly as present as a bright slash of red, and yes, they would be drifting away, following Dr. Rabbitfoot's bright tempo.
When the music had faded, Peter got up from his bed and checked the window. Yes. Gone. They had not even left marks on the snow.
